Adi Robertson, The Verge’s senior tech and policy editor, makes an impassioned plea to not ban TikTok, China’s popular video-sharing app, on free speech grounds. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), speaking on the floor of the Senate on March 29, also raised First Amendment objections to a proposed TikTok prohibition.
Nonetheless, it is time to either ban TikTok or force the sale of all its shares to American parties. The American owners must also control all the app’s algorithms, in particular, the algorithms curating content. If Beijing does not permit such a sale, the federal government should expropriate TikTok.
“The First Amendment includes a right for citizens to receive information—even, in fact, foreign propaganda,” Robertson correctly writes in “The TikTok Ban Is a Betrayal of the Open Internet.” “And banning TikTok would affect not only speech from TikTok but also the speech of users on the platform, who could see their videos made inaccessible.”
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A forced sale, however, does not run afoul of the First Amendment. TikTok’s owner, ByteDance Ltd., is a Chinese company and therefore has no constitutional right to operate the popular app, which now has approximately 150 million users in the United States.
A legislative ban of the app, however, raises difficult constitutional issues. Congress is now considering the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats That Risk Information and Communications Technology Act, sponsored by Senators Mark Warner (D-Va.) and John Thune (R-S.D.). The RESTRICT Act, as the proposed legislation is known, creates a framework for the secretary of commerce to review foreign-linked social media platforms and to take action if necessary.
Read more: Gatestone Institute
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